Tuesday, April 11, 2017

HEROIC G7 Declines New Syria Sanctions

Ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) countries and Middle East allies who met in Lucca, Italy, to discuss the Syrian conflict failed to reach a new agreement on sanctions against Russia and Syria, calling for an investigation into last week's chemical weapons attack there before adopting new measures.

Further, sanctions never hurt a government leadership, only the general population. They are always a bad idea.

And as for Trump's missile attack:

"Any honest observer would know that upholding international norms against the use of chemical weapons is not the actual objective of the [U.S.] attack. As I noted in 2013, using force unilaterally and in clear violation of international law and norms in order to uphold another international norm is a shortsighted and simply bad idea. Moreover, deterring the employment of poisonous gases hardly requires a war," writes CFR's Micah Zenko in Foreign Policy.